MURKETING

Water fight

Pretty interesting piece in Business Week about  the battle in a Northern California town over whether or not to let Nestlé (“the largest bottled water company in America and purveyor of the Perrier, Poland Spring, and S. Pellegrino brands”) build a huge spring-water-bottling plant there.

A few interesting bits:

Nestlé employs 11 water hunters around the U.S. Besides monitoring water supplies, they search for new sources, typically in remote, pristine places like McCloud. A big part of their job is building relationships with locals, few of whom have dealt with a multinational.

And:

A pall of aggrievement hangs over Nestlé Waters’ headquarters. There’s an attitude that essentially asks: Why us? CEO Jeffery has been in bottled water since the late 1970s. He worked at Perrier until Nestlé bought it in 1992 and put him in charge of Nestlé’s North American water business. And he has long seen his product as a healthy alternative to soda in a nation that is increasingly obese.

For several years now, Jeffery says, he has watched other companies win green cred for what he deems smoke-and-mirrors publicity stunts. A couple of years ago he recalls not being able to sleep, getting up and heading to his Greenwich study to write down the 10 things Nestlé was doing to reduce its carbon footprint. One of those things was designing the lightest-weight water bottle currently on the market. Jeffery also notes, correctly, that water bottlers use less H2O than makers of soda or beer. …
But soda and beer makers typically don’t mine pristine springs; they use tap water. So, for that matter, do Nestlé Waters’ main rivals, Coca-Cola’s Dasani and PepsiCo’s Aquafina. It’s instructive that Nestlé Waters was the only company asked to attend Congress’s first-ever hearings on the bottled water industry in December.

Absolut international incident?

Strange Maps, via The Plank:

This map, used in a Mexican ad campaign, shows what the US-Mexican border would look like in an ‘absolut’ (i.e. perfect) world: a large part of the US’s west is annexed to Mexico.

Needless to say this map made its way to ‘El Norte’, annoying and upsetting many Americans – even leading to calls for a boycott of the Swedish-made vodka. What must be particularly annoying is that this map has some basis in fact.

The Plank also points to the reaction of someone named Michelle Malkin:

The advertising firm that created the Absolut Reconquista ad is Teran/TBWA. Teran is based in Mexico City. The company’s website boasts a pretentious statement of philosophy advocating “disruption” as a “tool for change” and “agent of growth.” (Scroll your mouse over the little buttons in the upper-right margin.) The firm advocates “overturning assumptions and prejudices that get in the way of imagining new possibilities and visionary ideas that help create a larger share of the future.”

Translation: The company advocates overturning borders that get in the way of imagining new maps of North America that help Mexico create a larger share of the continent.

Well. Two things.

First: An ad agency with a pretentious mission statement full of doublespeak clichés about change and disruption? No way! Say it isn’t so! That’s never happened before!

Second: Like every other agency, what these marketing pros “advocate” is getting paid by their clients. The way they get paid by their clients is to get their clients talked about and noticed. And that was Absolut-ly the goal here. Ad agencies don’t have a political motive. They have a profit motive.

Crowd questions crowd’s wisdom

Speaking of Starbucks, the company just unveiled a new site to harness the suggestions of its customers and all of that. (If you’d like to make a suggestion, you have register for a “Starbucks.com account.”) It’s not interesting. But what it is interesting are the responses to the stunt on StarbucksGossip.com. For instance, it’s pointed out that:

For a site the “just launched” at the start of the shareholders meeting, it sure is full and has a lot of “votes”. Seems they backfilled it with a lot of comments that have been gathering dust.

And that:

There are already 1,300 pages of comments! And because they’re displayed in order of most votes to fewest votes, people are overwhelmingly likely to vote for those that already have a jillion votes, and therefore show up on the first page; any good ideas that lag a few pages back will get lost in the shuffle.

Indeed, as New York Magazine’s site points out, most of the top-vote-getting ideas are changes that are already underway.

Previously on Murketing.com: Q&A with Starbucksgossip.com proprietor Jim Romenesko.

[Update(s): Romenesko comments to Seattle Times: “My site will continue to thrive because it’s an authentic reflection of how customers and employees feel about the company. MyStarbucksIdea.com, on the other hand, is clearly a corporate propaganda site.” Oof! Meanwhile, a more upbeat assessment here.]

Q&A: (RE)

The widely discussed Product (Red) campaign has come up a couple of times here on Murketing. As you probably know, it involves various companies such as The Gap and Apple and American Express selling special red products: If you buy one, some portion of the proceeds go to fight AIDS in Africa. It’s fair to say that the response to this has been mixed.

One of the most interesting responses I’ve seen so far is an initiative called (RE). As its creators have explained, their view is that the (Red) campaign “implies that corporations, branding and consumption are a necessary and healthy part of involvement in a cause. ” The point of (RE) is to offer non-corporate alternatives for engagement in causes — and to provoke some deeper thinking about conspicuous consumption, engagement, and solving the world’s problems. (The while the name “(RE)” riffs off “(RED),” it’s also echoed by manifestations of the project that explicitly involve re-use.)

Through February 15, (RE) is part of an exhibition called Other Options, at (106) S. Division gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a show originated by InCubate in Chicago. On February 15, the creators of (RE) will auction red items, any red item at all, donated by anyone who wants to donate. Proceeds will go to charity. This is an example of the sort of thing that falls under the (RE) project.

I had a few Qs, and (RE)’s creators, Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr graciously provided some As. Here goes:

I’m curious — having read your F.A.Q. — to what extent (RE) is a response not just to (Red) specifically, but to “cause marketing” in general. (It’s become quite popular, as you know, for products and brands to “give a portion of proceeds” or “raise awareness,” etc. — from the Livestrong bracelet to … well all kinds of things).

You’re exactly right. When the (PRODUCT) RED campaign started back in October of ’06 we saw the opportunity for a timely response to (PRODUCT) RED specifically, but as we continued to expand the project we became aware of its ability to speak to much larger issues — concerns within cause marketing as well as consumption, waste, labor, etc. These aren’t easy issues to engage as a business or a consumer. That shouldn’t mean that we give up on trying, but instead that we look carefully at what supporting a cause in a particular manner does for all parties involved.

There are three (RE) manifestations, or initiatives — were they all devised at once, or did the project start with one idea and evolve to include the others? Read more

Catalogs, consumer choice, and the annoyance-to-profits formula

Back in October I mentioned a service called Catalog Choice, which is designed to let you opt out of, well, catalogs. I signed up, and have been steadily typing in catalog information ever since. But I can’t say I’ve seen a notable reduction in how many show up in the mail, week after week.

They tell you to wait ten weeks for results, or something like that, so I figured maybe it would just take time. But recently Business Week wrote about the service and it turns out there’s another issue. Apparently what Catalog Choice does is collect this data and turn it over to the catalog retailers, who are supposed to act on it by purging people like me from their lists. But BW says at least some retailers simply “blew off” off this information, and “have done nothing with the names.” And an email from something called The Direct Marketing Association to its members is quoted:

Bearing the subject line “JUST SAY NO,” it warned retailers that Catalog Choice’s “priority is to eliminate catalogs as a marketing medium. It is not in your interest to further their efforts!”

Evidently few retailers were willing to talk to BW. LL Bean claimed it is “evaluating [the Catalog Choice data] for accuracy.” Williams-Sonoma/Pottery Barn “says it ‘is still figuring out the right thing to do for our customers.'”

It would presumably be more accurate to say they’re still trying to figure out the right thing to do for their bottom line. After all, pretty much everybody claims to hate catalogs — but obviously lots of people order from them just the same. So the basic operating procedure is to send catalogs to people who say they don’t want them, and maybe even believe they don’t want them. It might seem wasteful to spend money pursuing such people, but I’m guessing the payoff is there: Annoying potential customers is, really, part of the business model. The question likely boils down to whether the Catalog Choice effort can make a big enough issue of this to embarrass the companies into deciding that maybe its annoyance-to-profits algorithm needs an adjustment.

120+ years of hating advertising

One of my running themes is that there is nothing new about contemporary consumers being fed up with advertising. We hear all the time about supposed discovery that what sets today’s consumers apart is that they (we) “see through” marketing, and don’t trust it, etc.

So I made sure to bookmark the above image from blog Paleo-Future when it made the rounds while I was away last week. It’s from 1885, and titled “Advertising In The Near Future,” one of the earliest examples I’ve seen yet of popular distaste for ad overload and just how bad it could get. Particularly interesting in the satirical slathering of the Statue of Liberty with commercial slogans is the presence of “suredeath” cigarettes.

Clearly there were people who could “see through” marketing in the late 19th century, and who could count an audience that would get the joke. Just as clearly, seeing through marketing didn’t quite add up to resisting marketing. Kinda like today.

Chris Anderson attempts to fend off PR spam

Chris “Long Tail Guy” Anderson lashes out at lazy PR people in this post, going so far as to list the email addresses of those he’s blacklisted. The comments to the post are interesting: Some criticize Anderson for leaving the addresses out there for spam bots to harvest. And one guy explains how he spends thousands of dollars to by email lists to promote his photography business. (As the replies note, that money may not be well spent if the lists include people like Anderson, who as editor in chief of Wired is not a relevant contact.)

I’m sympathetic to Anderson’s point of view, in that I get a ridiculous amount of PR email from people who clearly have no idea what I write about. In fact I recognize several of the addresses on his blacklist. I try pretty hard to be accessible because I like hearing from readers, and actually I like hearing from anybody who has a good, relevant idea for me. And I’m not slagging everyone in PR here — I do have regular contact with some very clever people in that line of work, who actually understand what I’m interested in.

The trouble is figuring out a way to be accessible without being overwhelmed by static. I used to publish an email address in the Times Mag for Consumed, but I had to have them take it out, because basically the address was getting added to so many PR blast lists it became useless, drowning out the feedback from real readers in a sea of off-point flackery. Pretty sad.

So I don’t know if Anderson’s post is the best solution to the problem, but I do think it’s a problem.

Design critic + hoops fan = protest T-shirt maker

A fan of the University of Kansas basketball team, and, more to the point, of the “curling, arc-serifed typeface” on the team’s uniforms, is upset about a redesign:

[In] an ill-conceived (and expensive) attempt to standardize the KU brand, university officials have replaced these famed letterforms with a typeface that only a corporate consultant could love. The new typeface– Trajan–cuts a lackluster profile unfit for the country’s premier program.

Or the T’s he’s selling more concisely put it: Trajan Sucks.

I’ve been a little out of the loop, so maybe Uni Watch has already covered this. But I heard about it here.

(Red) remixed

Wendy Dembo writes:

Last year when the Gap came out with their (red) campaign, the first word that popped into my head, was insu(red)/uninsu(red). They did a few kind of ironic shirts like bo(red) and ti(red), but I wondered why they didn’t make an uninsu(red) shirt.

With insurance looking like it’s going to be the touch point for the 2008 Presidential election, I thought that making these shirts could hopefully get some uninsured kids to think about their need for health insurance, perhaps even the need for universal health care.

She got Jeff Staple to execute the shirts, which are on sale at the Reed Space in New York.

It’s interesting to see something in the brand underground realm using the visual remix strategy to address a political issue. It will also be interesting to see what sort of reaction it ends up getting.

In praise of dubious trend stories

For months I’ve been reading and hearing about the supposed backlash against bottled water. The stories, whether online or on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, always point to those couple of restaurants in San Francisco that serve tap water, and say that the bottled water industry is concerned about the tide turning against them, and so on.

And at some point, every story includes some equivalent of what’s known as “the to be sure graf.” That term refers to the paragraph — sometimes literally beginning with the words “to be sure” — that completely undercuts the entire thesis of the story. In this case, the To Be Sure Graf discloses that bottled water sales are rising steadily. That is to say: There is no backlash.

Yes, people are raising concerns. Yes, they make an excellent case about the downsides of bottled water. But in terms of marketplace proof that consumers are actually changing their behavior in a measurable way? It’s not there. As the WSJ noted yesterday: “Bottled-water volume rose 11% in the first half of 2007. Soda volume decreased 5.9%.”

In general, this kind of thing drives me crazy. But I’ve decided to stop complaining about it. Because I’ve had an epiphany. Bullshit trend stories can be a force for good.

What I mean is, it has occurred to me that it’s possible that the bullshit trend stories about consumers fleeing bottled water could, eventually, if they achieve critical mass, actually cause consumers to flee bottled water — or at least to recycle their empties.

For years, activists have made the case against bottled water. Lately, that case has also been made in some pretty good articles. But that hasn’t been enough to make any particularly noticeable impact on consumer behavior. So maybe dubious trend stories will do the trick. If enough people keep writing them, then some day, they will actually start to be true.

More New Era street cred

I’m a little late on this, but what can I say, I’ve been busy.

Remember this earlier post about New Era and gang-related cap designs that surfaced in Cleveland? Counterfeit Chic notes a similar ruckus in NYC. According Fox News (so it must be true):

Outraged local activists charge that New Era, the caps’ manufacturer, and the New York Yankees — whose famous interlocking NY cap features a choice of a red and black bandanna design for the Bloods, blue and gray for the Crips and a gold crown for the Latin Kings.

Backlash product of the day

We Are The Market says: “If you can’t get with the global hoopla surrounding the release of the limited edition canvas tote by Anya Hindmarch, this is probably the bag for you.” At Cafe Press.

Design: Another backlash candidate?

In other backlash news, ad agency Butler, Shine’s blog Influx Insights posts about “the impending design backlash,” citing Icon Magazine. The August issue of Icon Magazine includes 50 (!) “manifestos” from critics, architects, and designers. A few are pretty crabby, mostly the first two, from Peter Saville (“Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation.” “Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it.” Etc.) and Jasper Morrison:

Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise…

Elsewhere the magazine suggests “Why Design Needs a Recession.” Listing a variety of design/marketplace problems and complaints, the magazine says: “Design is in a decadent phase that won’t abate until we are forced to rediscover what it is that we need.”

Fun stuff. On the other hand, it turned out that most of the mini-manifestos were not particularly crabby at all.

All of my “friends” are going to be marketers

Has anybody started a Facebook backlash yet? I see Newsweek is speculating on whether Facebook can hang onto its “cool.” I’m in no position to judge such things, but I will pass along this one anecdotal observation.

A few months ago, I joined Facebook. This in itself is a bad sign, but then again I’m a journalist who covers consumer culture, and in the course of snooping around on something or other, I basically had to join. I did just enough with my account to make it clear who I was, and why I was there, and then got on with whatever I was working on.

Soon I started to get friend requests. I would accept, log out, and get back to work. That has continued. I think I have 30 friends at this point, but I’d have to log on to check, and I don’t want to bother. Here’s what’s new:

Recently, an increasing number of the friend requests are from marketing people. Consultants, ad agency folk, the like. So far, they’ve mostly been from people who I actually have interviewed or am friends with or have some other connection to. But yesterday I got one from a guy I really don’t know, he’s just a marketer type who has pitched me in the past. I can’t decide whether to accept. I think this is a bad sign.

I guess it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen, and that it will happen, in particular, to me. And I have nothing against Facebook, which seems like it might be worth spending time on, if I had any time to spend. (That’s why I can’t decide whether to accept this guy’s “friend”ship, because I’m holding onto the possibility that I may actually find Facebook useful at some point.) And at least Facebook doesn’t give me the same instant, throbbing headache that MySpace did.

But as an observer of marketers, and of trendiness, I would say that there may be a familiar pattern here, following Second Life and MySpace. First there’s an audience. Then the marketers (and the journalists and the trend-watchers) flood in. And then there’s a backlash. Often led by the marketers, the journalists, and the trend-watchers. So we’ll see.

Update: Mike Arauz answers “Yes. The Facebook backlash is now underway. (And like all respectable backlashes these days, I’m sure we will see the backlash-to-the-backlash before most Facebook users have even had a chance to update their status.)” I think is parenthetical point there is good. Here’s his whole post.
And: AdPulp weighs in, and notes earlier chatter of Facebook fatigue.
Plus: More related links in the comments. Thanks all.

Croc On

Consumed: Crocs: A trendy shoe marches on despite detractors — or maybe because of them.

In the summer of 2006, Crocs wearers ranged from children to senior citizens, from the image-indifferent to the celebrity chef Mario Batali. The suggestion of ubiquity was probably magnified by the fact that seeing one pair of the oversize and often brightly colored footwear felt like seeing five. The Washington Post noted the “goofy” shoes were spreading “like vermin,” and Radar Magazine anointed the “hideous” items “summer’s most unfortunate fad.” The good news for critics was that fads fade and that the Croc thing seemed to be at a peak. But a year later Crocs still have traction; in fact, the company’s sales through the first quarter of 2007 are roughly triple what they were for the same period in 2006, and imitations and knockoffs abound. The shoes might still end up as props at the kitschy ’00s-themed parties of future college students (worn with trucker hats for the guys and huge sunglasses for the ladies). But it may be that Crocs have a foothold not just despite critics of the shoes’ appearance but because of them…. Read more